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NetMRI's Switch Port Management (SPM) page (Network Explorer –> > Switch Port Management) solves all of these issues. SPM enables both big-picture and highly focused views of an entire switched Ethernet network, from the overall network layer to individual devices and interfaces. Extending throughout the entire switched network, all endpoints are detected, tabulated and monitored by NetMRI.
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The switches and switch-routers have already been discovered by NetMRI. Switch Port Management polls switches for a detailed collection of information on switch port connectivity, the status of ports, and end devices. For information, see Running the Setup Wizard, Configuring Network Discovery Settings, and Running Network Discovery on Routed and Switched Networks. |
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- After performing the initial setup and defining your Discovery settings, you must define your global switchport polling settings. Go to Click the Settings icon –> > Setup –> > Collection and Groups –> > Global and click the > Switchport Manager side tab to define your switch polling settings. Several primary polling options are offered:
- Periodic Polling: Define regular polling time periods. Choose a polling interval of 1 or more Minutes or Hours. This is the default polling behavior for NetMRI. The default polling interval is 60 minutes.
- Scheduled Polling: Schedule recurrent polling based on hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly time periods. Click Add New Schedule and select a Recurrence Pattern of Once, Hourly, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. In all cases, you must choose an Execution Time.
- On-demand polling: Click Poll Now to immediately begin polling all switch and switch-router devices in the managed network. See Understanding SPM Polling for more information.
- Completely disable switch port polling.
- After defining global polling settings, you can define more specific polling settings at the Device Group level. See Device Actions in Switch Port Management for more information.
After some time, polled switch performance and configuration data appear in the NetMRI UI. - Go to Network Explorer –> Switch Port Management.
The left-side menu provides three categories: Devices, Interfaces, and End Hosts. - Click any menu item on the left for more information about the
switched devices in the network. See Using the Switch Port Management Console for more information.Anchor bookmark237 bookmark237 - For port control, you can set any switched interface to administratively Up or administratively Down by right-clicking the switch interface link and selecting Set Admin Status. The NetMRI Sandbox with the built-in Port Activation Perl script is required for this operation. See "Using the NetMRI Sandbox" in Job Scripting for more information.
- You can also assign or change a VLAN assignment for a switch port by right-clicking the switch interface link and selecting Edit VLAN Membership.
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Two hierarchical lists appear in the Switch Port Management page, the Select Device Groups list on the right and the Devices, Interfaces, and End Hosts categories on the left. To begin using the Switch Port Management console, select any device group on the right-hand list. Each device group represents a data set from a selected group of network devices. Consider that some device groups (Routing, for example) have systems with ports that will not be managed or cataloged by Switch Port Management.
After selecting a device group on the right, choose either Devices, Interfaces, or End Hosts on the left. Then choose a menu option from the exploded list. For example, Devices has five menu items.
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As an example, you decide to look at the list of network switches that have changed in their status or their configuration over the previous 30 days from the current date. Choose Devices –> > Changed Devices, click the Select Date/Period icon, and choose the time period (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, 7-Day, or 30-Day). The time window shown in the currently selected page changes to the new value, and the current page changes in a number of ways:
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You can shift time windows across the calendar. Select a date three weeks previous to the current. Then, choose Period –> > 7-Day. The current table redraws to show the currently selected data set. Then, use the Select Date/Period menu to select day three months in the past. The 7-day time window shifts to the new position, with the selected date as the last day in the time window.
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Switch Port Management (and its polling functions) operates only with devices detected as Switches or Switch-Routers in NetMRI. For more information, see Performing On-Demand Switch Port Polling. |
Network device polling is the key mechanism for building Switch Port Management (SPM)'s switching information, and the polling features provide considerable flexibility. You use polling at the Device Group level to check for changes to any active device in that group. You can define polling time periods for individual device groups so that administrators have near-real-time capabilities for
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The Settings icon –> > Setup –> > Collection and Groups –> > Global tab provides the appliance-wide settings for polling all Switch and Switch-Router devices in the network. |
NetMRI provides several polling and discovery optimizations under Advanced Settings. For more information, see Changing Advanced SPM Settings for details.
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You can find the default global switch port management polling settings for all device groups (Basic and Extended) under the Settings icon –> > Setup –> > Collection and Groups –> > Global tab.
You can also apply specific switch port management polling settings to the Extended device groups. These settings, located under the Settings icon –> > Setup –> > Collection and Groups –> > Groups tab, take precedence over the settings defined in the Global tab.
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Infoblox recommends regular collection of interface performance statistics for Switch Port Management-managed systems, differing from the irregular or lengthy time periods used by the automatic collection of switch-forwarding data in the full NetMRI configuration. For information on switched interface management, see Managing Interfaces Through Switch Port Management.
Performance polling can be executed immediately, on demand, with limitations. If someone manually attempts to poll a device group when another poll of the entire network is already running, NetMRI notifies the user that another polling session is already in progress and will not execute the manual request until the current session completes.
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- On the global level, begin polling all switches in the network by choosing Settings –> > Setup –> > Collection and Groups –> > Switch Port Management side tab and then click Poll Now. Note that no other polling operations are allowed by NetMRI when this process is being carried out.
- At the device group level, initiate polling for a subset of devices in the managed network by going to the Settings icon –> > Setup –> > Collection and Groups –> > Groups tab, select a group, click Edit in the table row, choose the Switch Port Management tab, and then click Poll Now.
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The Devices Present link (Network Explorer –> > Switch Port Management –> > Devices –> > Devices Present) is the top-level view in Switch Port Management. It provides the complete list of switches and switch routers that are being managed by NetMRI. The Capacity Summary– Ports pane appears at the top of the table, showing the network totals for Free Ports and Available Ports.
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As NetMRI does not retrieve the VLAN type information from your devices and, therefore, does not display it in the Edit Interface VLAN Membership dialog, you may want to use meaningful names for VLANs to distinguish between data and voice types. |
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The Ports Present table provides the list of switched access interfaces for the entire network, the aggregate interface list for any chosen device group, and the list of interfaces for any chosen LAN switch or distribution switch.
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In the Switch Port Management page, the End Devices category displays all end-host devices associated with LAN switches in the selected device group, and filters them into several functional categories.
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To optimally configure Switch Port Management for end-host detection, ensure that all end-host subnetworks that you want to be managed are included in NetMRI's Discovery IP ranges. The discovered end hosts must also be excluded from the management by NetMRI. This can be done by specifying the IP ranges for the end host network segments in Step 2 of the Setup Wizard or by opening Settings icon –> > Setup –> > Discovery Settings following initial NetMRI setup. For more information, see the Configuring Discovery Ranges. |
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Virtual Machines acting as De Facto end hosts in the network, including VMs that directly communicate through a switch port, and VMs communicating through a 'virtual switch,' which in turn communicates through a switch port, will not appear in End Host-related tables and pages. NetMRI will discover such VMs but they are not visible in End Hosts tables. Virtual switches are also not supported by NetMRI. Virtual machine-based hosts appear in on the Network Explorer –> > Inventory page under Connected End Hosts, but their entries will not show switching infrastructure.
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- Action icon: Provides the Action menu with End Host History, Interface History, and Device History options, changing the Admin Status for an end host interface , and editing the description and VLAN assignment.
- Host IP address: IP address of the end host, provides a live link to the Device Viewer.
- Host Name: DNS host name (if any), provides a live link to the Device Viewer.
- Host MAC: 48-bit hardware address of the end host's Ethernet port.
- Last Seen: The timestamp of the most recent detection of the end host connected to the given switch interface. You can also choose to display the First Seen data column, which is the timestamp of the moment when the end host was first detected by NetMRI as a host connected to its current LAN switch interface.
- Device Name: The LAN switching device to which the host is currently associated (live link to the Device Viewer).
- Interface: The LAN switched interface to which the end host connects (live link to the Interface Viewer).
- If Oper Status: The LAN switched interface's operating status (live link to the Interface Viewer).
- VLAN Name: The active VLAN to which the end host is currently bound (live link to the VLAN Viewer).
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The ARP Cache Refresh Period defines the time period between ARP refreshes by NetMRI across all switch ports. Before any other switchport polling operations take place (including device group or global polling operations initiated by the NetMRI user), another ARP refresh is carried out by the appliance regardless of the time interval. To modify advanced SPM settings, perform the following:
- Go to Click the Settings icon –> > General Settings –> > Advanced Settings.
- Under the Switch Port Management category –> > Free to Available Ports option, click Edit to change the amount of time, in days, a port must remain Free before it becomes administratively Available for new connectivity.
- Under the Switch Port Management category –> > ARP Cache Refresh Period option, click Edit to change the time in seconds between ARP refreshes on switch ports managed by the appliance. The default is 300 seconds, because switch forwarding tables are frequently purged from LAN switching devices. The default on Cisco switches is five minutes/300 seconds. NetMRI primarily uses ARP Cache refreshes to improve the accuracy of end-device discovery. Without this feature, some endpoints may not be discovered and cataloged.
- The ARP Cache Refresh Ignore Discovery Ranges Advanced Setting helps to optimize the discovery of end hosts by disabling pinging of any devices outside of specified discovery ranges. By default, this feature is set to False, which means that devices outside the configured discovery ranges may be pinged by NetMRI. Set this value to True to restrict pinging to end hosts within defined IP ranges.
- Switch Port Management can use the ARP Cache Refresh Device History to allow pinging of devices listed in older tables compiled from previous polling days, prior to the most recently compiled End Host data tables. The default value is 14 days and the minimum value is one day.
- Click OK when finished.
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